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Just over five years ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer crushed opponents in the televised quiz show Jeopardy. It was hard to foresee then, but artificial intelligence is now permeating our daily lives. Since then, IBM has expanded the Watson brand to a cognitive computing package with hardware and software used to diagnose diseases, explore for oil and gas, run scientific computing models, and allow cars to drive autonomously. The company has now announced new AI hardware and software packages. The original Watson used advanced algorithms and natural language interfaces to find and narrate answers.

Just over five years ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer crushed opponents in the televised quiz show Jeopardy. It was hard to foresee then, but artificial intelligence is now permeating our daily lives. Since then, IBM has expanded the Watson brand to a cognitive computing package with hardware and software used to diagnose diseases, explore for oil and gas, run scientific computing models, and allow cars to drive autonomously. The company has now announced new AI hardware and software packages. The original Watson used advanced algorithms and natural language interfaces to find and narrate answers.

Google has cool technology to recognize images and speech, and IBM's hardware can diagnose diseases and beat humans in Jeopardy. Combine the two, and you get a powerful computer with serious brains. IBM is merging Google's artificial intelligence tools with its own cognitive computing technologies, allowing deep-learning systems to more accurately find answers to complex questions or recognize images or voices. Google's open-source TensorFlow machine-learning tools are being packed into IBM's PowerAI, which is a toolkit for computer learning. The two can be combined to improve machine learning on IBM's Power servers.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, we have autonomous cars, chat bots, and speech recognition. Microsoft's CNTK (Cognitive Toolkit) is one among many platforms that trains computers to learn, and it's getting an upgrade. CNTK drives the Microsoft services Cortana and Skype language translation, and it boasts more than 90 percent accuracy in speech recognition tasks. Microsoft will soon release an upgraded CNTK toolkit, and one hardware maker wants to ensure the toolkit works best on its hardware. Nvidia is partnering with Microsoft to optimize its GPU development tools for CNTK.

This proclamation, from NVIDIA co-founder, president, and CEO Jensen Huang at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), held from March 26 to March 29 in San Jose, Calif., only hints at this company's growing impact on state-of-the-art computing. Read also: Nvidia's new supercomputer Clara designed to act as hospital processing hub Nvidia's physical products are accelerators (for third-party hardware) and the company's own GPU-powered workstations and servers. Jensen Huang, co-founder, president, and CEO at Nvidia, presents the sweep of the company's growing AI Platform at GTC 2018 in San Jose, Calif. On the hardware front, the headlines from GTX built on the foundation of Nvidia's graphical processing unit advances. If the "feeds and speeds" stats mean nothing to you, let's put them into the context of real workloads.